Magical Forest

(

)

/ About the project

In 2022, my team at Zappar helped Legoland roll-out a series of location-based Augmented Reality experiences, that gamified walking through the new Mythica area of Legoland Windsor.

Following the success of that launch, Legoland decided to expand the park area by creating Magical Forest - a physical walk through the world of Mythica, with more LEGO creatures to explore, each with their own AR experience, and a cave area featuring 6 screens which acted as windows into Mythica.

Having built a flexible structure for Mythica in 2022, we were able to leverage the character scanning feature to unlock new content attached to the new in-park creatures. These featured Bitsandbobs (a bat, unicorn, pony hybrid), venus flytraps, crystal crabs, baby dragons, and a more exciting reveal of mother dragon descending on the Legoland skies.

The bigger challenge came from the on-screen content required for 2 of the experiences, which needed to tell an interesting story and look fantastic.

After our storyboards were approved, we worked closely with the park's building team to ensure the screens' positions, quality, and framing within the environment, were fully complemented by the content we were creating for them to play.

/ CREDITS

Client:

Legoland

Studio:

Zappar

/ Year

2023

/ MORE INFO

For the cave's windows into Mythica, we decided to create a lava-ridden environment, home to Mother Dragon, her baby dragons, and Crystal Claws (the crabs).

With Zappar not having the capabilities of a VFX studio, and with a tight deadline, I leveraged my experience with Unreal Engine for a rapid iterative creation process, allowing my team to develop the lava cave scene with materials and shaders that could be previewed in real-time.

With the environment all set, we were able to create a camera to represent each screen's output in the cave, and then proceeded to animate the characters in a 2 minute sequence that saw them make full use of the space within the cave and the skies above (as 2 of the screens were placed in the ceiling of the physical space).

Nanite particles and trails made for a fantastic transition effect as Mother Dragon transforms into her organic form after being woken up by a crab, triggering her to expel a giant flammable roar.

A separate large screen at the entrance of the Magical Forest featured one of the creatures, with a physical button that triggered it to transform from LEGO to its organic form when pressed by park visitors.

Being a horse-like character, this one required extra consideration for the 3D hair and its physics, as the character flew around the screen.

As the on-screen content didn't need to be rendered in real-time, we took full advantage of Unreal's Sequencer to export full-quality 4k videos, which could be played by small media players on-site, and controlled by the park's tech team.